multiplayer, any way to decrease my ping?

Being in Australia, I get 300-500ms (shudder) pings on American and European servers, and he aus/nz ones are always empty. I tried using a U.S vpn which didn't seem to do anything. Any way around this?

move to america or europe

invictius said:

How do I break the laws of physics?

Find people in Australia to play against.

Find the Australian nodes of the Internet backbones and move right next to them. This might offer you a small speedup, but it won't do miracles.

Alternatively, find an ISP that offers modems based on quantum entanglement technology.

Gez said:

Find the Australian nodes of the Internet backbones and move right next to them. This might offer you a small speedup, but it won't do miracles.

Alternatively, find an ISP that offers modems based on quantum entanglement technology.

My college is on an educational/research backbone: http://www.aarnet.edu.au/library/AARNetInternationalMap_September_2013_Final.pdf

Don't have an international speed test handy (I think pings were 80-100ms) but a local one on hand:

21ms is a ping time you'd expect to another server located 50 miles away in Australia. With international ping times to Australia or Europe you're fighting against the speed of light and the physical hardware of the network connection between the countries.

It's 8,128 miles from Australia to the US west coast:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=distance+from+australia+to+california

Remember that a ping time is the time it takes for you to send a packet and the reply to come back to you, so:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=2+*+(8128+miles+%2F+speed+of+light)

=87ms. That's the lowest ping time you can ever get, under the laws of physics. A factor of 3-4 slowdown from the cable and the network hardware along the route isn't very surprising. Certainly most games are probably pretty unplayable over 200ms. If you're on an academic network then you probably already have a pretty decent Internet connection (see how your speed test results say "better than 99% of AU"?). Sorry, but you're SOL.

fraggle said:

21ms is a ping time you'd expect to another server located 50 miles away in Australia. With international ping times to Australia or Europe you're fighting against the speed of light and the physical hardware of the network connection between the countries.

It's 8,128 miles from Australia to the US west coast:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=distance+from+australia+to+california

Remember that a ping time is the time it takes for you to send a packet and the reply to come back to you, so:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=2+*+(8128+miles+%2F+speed+of+light)

=87ms. That's the lowest ping time you can ever get, under the laws of physics. A factor of 3-4 slowdown from the cable and the network hardware along the route isn't very surprising. Certainly most games are probably pretty unplayable over 200ms. If you're on an academic network then you probably already have a pretty decent Internet connection (see how your speed test results say "better than 99% of AU"?). Sorry, but you're SOL.

I feel sorry for the suckers that will believe in this then.

invictius said:

I feel sorry for the suckers that will believe in this then.

It's possible that in some, very limited, situations, something like this might help. But it's not going to help when your packets have to traverse thousands of miles of ocean.

Try to gather a group of Australians and play organised games with them? You could have a weekly event or maybe something even more regular. It would probably take some time to make it popular enough but it should be possible, just be persistent.

Well, depending on the port you use, you might be able to activate the unlagged feature. As far as i know, all of the major multiplayer ports include unlagged support but it's bound to be accessed differently for each, so check your options.

I don't know what "the unlagged feature" is but some ports have features that hide latency by doing client side prediction that moves your point of view before the response has come back from the server. This kind of thing helps make the game more playable but ultimately they only help to a certain degree. What matters most in a deathmatch is being able to see your opponent's position in real time, and you can only do that with low latency (low ping).

Host the matches - let your opponents cope with the terrible ping times. <evil grin>

A number of europeans have been pretty happy with the unlagged feature in Odamex and can contend on American servers with pretty decent success. The North American Doom Association does this often in their open tournaments. Maybe drop by #nadoom on irc.quakenet.org for more information (as well as #odamex on the same network)

There is this compile option for MONSTER PREDICTION in DoomLegacy. I have not tried it and do not know if it even compiles anymore.
I always assumed it was so the monsters could hit a moving player.